Are MMOs illegal now?

[Sniper]

[ QUOTE ]
I personally know people who have done each of the things listed above. Should they all be in jail?

If we really want to protect people from financial ruin, we should require that everyone has their paycheck direct deposited into a government controlled escrow account. Automatic payments could go from that account to pay essential bills (rent/mortgage, car payments, utilities, etc). You would get a monthly allotment of food stamps and any other expenditures would need to be approved by a CFA that works for the government.

Since we want the government to protect us from ourselves, why don't we just go all the way with it?


[/ QUOTE ]

Hate to tell you, but you have a much farther way to go in your thinking to get to "all the way"...

You live in a gov't facility... eat communal gov't provided food... work at your assigned gov't job... no paycheck...

Maybe one of the politicos will remind us what form of gov't that is...

[stabn]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I'd like to say I think it's petty to try to expose MMO's as breaking the laws.
While, we can use as many allies as possible, I don't want to ruin anyone else's fun, just because my government is so lame.
This line of thinking seems similiar to the stoner pointing out all the evils of alcohol, or the "he's doing it, why can't I?" arguement.

I don't think a person gets persuaded to see our side of things if we're the ones putting the spotlight on their little bit of fun. Kinda makes us the bad guys, you know. If they have too much fun, our big bad government will attack them all on it's own, and if that happens then we should welcome in any brothers-by-persecution into our fold.

[/ QUOTE ]

If underage gambling is "standard" for an MMO...

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It isn't. It is standard for most mmo's to ban gambling.

[repulse]

Everything said about Magic Online so far has been accurate and insightful. I agree with all of it.

It is worth noting, however, that in no way does the company (WotC) operating it assign tangible value to the tickets or in any way facilitate their resale. As "virtual property" laws are, as far as I know, not well-defined anywhere quite yet, this might be enough to remove WotC from any sort of liability regarding gambling.

The way it goes down is like this... the most popular type of online Magic tournament takes both virtual packs and tickets to enter. The online tournaments pay out only virtual packs of cards as prizes.

WotC encourages in-game trading (an integrated part of the game for both swapping cards for cards and cards/packs for tickets), so a winning player can trade his prize packs to a player who needs them in exchange for tickets. The tickets cost $1 to buy directly from WotC but (I'm PRETTY sure I read this somewhere) have absolutely no legal cash value after they are purchased. The game economy creates the value of the tickets since everybody needs them to play the tournaments.

Wotc permits but does not encourage or facilitate external trading of in-game products such as eBaying tickets/cards or selling them for Stars cash. This is probably pretty crucial in terms of how they are allowed to legally operate. Their tournament operations consist only of awarding virtual products with no inherent value.

Another interesting aspect of this is that WotC does directly offer some degree of exchanging the virtual cards for objects of tangible value. If a player collects 1 of each card from any given in-print set, they have the option of having WotC remove the virutal cards from his or her account in exchange for getting shipped a factory-sealed real-life set of those same cards. I'm not sure if WotC places an inherent value on these physical cards, but of course the secondary market ensures that they have value. Also, this has nothing to do with the tickets.

I agree that the "opt-in prize eligibility" aspect has always seemed a bit fuzzy from a legal sense, but the factors of intangibility and lack of inherent value might be what's covering them here.

Could such an economy evolve for poker? Possibly, but of course, if it did, it would get a lot more attention and scrutiny than Magic Online has. The skill and luck aspects of both Magic Online and online poker are pretty similar, and I agree that it makes no rational sense for one to be legal and one not to be. In the world we live in today, there is probably no reconciling of this.

[sooooooo]

The fact that someone without a law degree(myself) was the first person to apparently realize that their sealed deck tournaments with prize structures based on the amount of entrants was illegal, makes me believe that almost everything else related to Magic Online has not been thoroughly analyzed by Hasbro lawyers.

Moreover, they purposely target individuals under the age of 18 in their marketing efforts. Where are all the loony grandmas that used to complain about the pentagrams on Magic cards!

-The L8 Gr8 RyanG

[jluker7]

MTGO took off their pentagrams for this reason Lawl..

yea i was thinking about mtgo the other day and how they are no different. i used to play that site and made profit winning tournaments then selling tickets on ebay for 93 cents. instead of 1 dollar value.

[Uglyowl]

FBI checks gambling in "Second Life" MSNBC

FBI visited the online world, but it is unsure at this time if this violates UIGEA.

This has started to hit the wire today and I think it is probably good that there will be more pissed of people at our government.

[cowboy.up]

I saw that earlier and it certainly has some interesting implications. The three largest "poker rooms" said to be pulling over $1,500 a month each. That's real money too, in game you earn Linden dollars which can be converted into USD on the "Linden Exchange."